During Project Scorpio's exclusive reveal to Digital Foundry, Microsoft showcased Turn 10's ForzaTech demo running on the new Xbox hardware. Apparently, Turn 10 was able to transport Forza 6 Apex's Ultra settings from PC to the Scorpio hardware with GPU power to spare. Turn 10's Software Architect Chris Tector said to Eurogamer:
The crazy story here is that we've gone over our PC ultra settings and for everything that's GPU-related, we've been able to max it - and that's what we're running at, 88 per cent.
This is rendering the player LOD for every car, so you won't see a single LOD pop. [It's the] top-level model you'd see in race, one below what you see in Autovista, the model you usually only see for the player. And then we balance out LODs across the scene. It's a disgusting abuse of GPU power is what it is, right?
It's horrible but we can do it and we still have the power left over. The awesome part about the whole story [is] that we can spend all this time heading into the future. Instead of saying how are we going to wrestle to get the performance on this, we're actually saying we can make this quality trade-off or this quality trade-off and spend that time iterating heading towards much better image quality - so instead of stressing about getting to a final resolution for titles or a final frame-rate, we can really drive it all into quality.
It's not just Turn 10 that's getting this kind of results, according to Microsoft. Kevin Gammill, Group Program Manager at Xbox, said:
Chris's experience is not atypical of what we've seen from partners we've had in - varying, different degrees of results but all positive. It's been great.
Albert Penello, Senior Director of Product Management and Planning, added:
I think this is the earliest in terms of time to ship. As Chris was alluding to, it's usually right down to the wire. And now we've got fully performant boxes going out shortly... We're seeing exceptionally fast 'getting up and running' times with developers, so we're pretty bullish. I like the direction we're heading, where we're hearing a lot of time spent on quality, not a lot of time spent on performance tuning or engines or the technical development side.
With the official specifications now published for good, it shouldn't be long until we hear impressions from other developers on Scorpio. Stay tuned.